MainView for IMS™ Management

Simplified IMS performance management

MainView for IMS Management provides IMS and DBCTL monitoring, performance tuning, reporting, cost allocation, and automation—all from a single, consolidated point of control. With this solution, you’ll be able to:

Reduce the risk of costly outages by identifying and resolving IMS and DBCTL problems before they affect end-user service levels.

Clear, real-time monitoring for lower risk and lower cost

MainView for IMS Management delivers an exhaustive view of everything that happens in your IMS environment. Armed with this level of detail, you’ll be able to track problems to their source in record time, automate recovery actions so you’re never caught by the same issue twice, and keep a careful tally of resource usage so you can recover your costs later.

Extensive call tracing

Debug complex performance problems with the help of detailed call tracing that covers elapsed time, return codes, and I/O information.

Out-of-the-box automation

Take advantage of built-in automations to solve common problems, and then start building your own with a user-friendly, code-free interface.

Integrated IMS commands

Manipulate IMS resources directly from the MainView interface, including the ability to purge users, without the need to remember complex IMS commands.

Simple, accurate chargeback features

Recover the costs of your IMS services by tracking detailed usage information and billing it back to your customers.

IMS hotspots reporting

Know which mission critical BMPs or transaction or applications are performing badly before they impact the business

Faster problem resolution

Integration with BMC IMS Utilities identifies the precise time and logs required to speed problem remediation.

Versatile security options

Secure your views, services, and commands either with easy-to-administer internal security features or with an external security manager.

Central, web-based interface

Enjoy the convenience of a user-friendly, web-based GUI that consolidates information from all of the MainView products you run.

Dynamic thresholds

Use the Threshold Advisor feature to set intelligent, dynamic thresholds based on real-time data and business cycles.

Historical reporting and analysis

Take advantage of sophisticated data views to compare historical and current data or build analytical reports. Create reports in CSV format for easy publishing and use by third-party products.

Actionable intelligence

Take the guess work out of scheduling which applications need to be preloaded. IT staff are provided with recommendations of which applications should be preloaded.

Optimized resource usage

Detects looping tasks including BMPs, MPRs, and MPPs and based on user specifications, resets, dumps, or cancels the resource that is negatively impacting availability.

“Our databases are up to date and well-structured. With this efficient monitoring and management, the bank is benefiting from high performance. This cascades down into a faster, more rewarding and more reliable experience for our customers.”

— Uwe Streiber, Database Manager, Commerzbank

Products included in this solution

The MainView for IMS Management solution is made up of the following products, which make it simple to maintain healthy IMS environments of every shape and size.

MainView for IMS Online provides IMS workload management, instant degradation detection, immediate exceptions determination, and rapid problem resolution. You’ll be able to monitor the usage and availability of IMS resources and the activities of workloads and issues warnings as soon as a problem is detected. The product flags any issues that are hindering transaction performance, allowing you to drill down to extensive levels of detail in each problem area. With MainView for IMS Online you’ll be able to see IMS activity information in real-time, easily obtain historical information, and make information available to multiple users with little additional overhead.

MainView for IMS Offline provides extensive transaction-level reporting and analysis capabilities, allowing you to implement a usage-based method for allocating costs. The IMS Event Collector feature creates unique records that are combined with IMS log data to generate comprehensive response time and resource utilization analysis reports. From there, the product’s Transaction Accounting feature can be used to charge customers precisely for the services they have used. The data collected by MainView for IMS Offline can be used both to verify whether service level agreements are being met and to understand long-term trends and changes in overall behavioral patterns. You’ll also enjoy easy report generation, with an ease-of-use feature that will guide you through generating the JCL for the report you need.

MainView AutoOPERATOR for IMS simplifies IMS management by providing a consolidated interface for managing both traditional implementations and sophisticated parallel sysplex data-sharing groups. This product can automatically take recovery or notification actions when any MainView monitor product raises an alarm. With an intuitive rule-building interface, you’ll be able to create powerful automation without the need for REXX coding. Replacing repetitive, error-prone manual interventions with automated ones will help you avoid costly performance interruptions.

MainView for DBCTL monitors and manages the use and availability of DBCTL resources and workloads, including the interaction with other subsystems. With this product, you’ll be able to identify resource constraints and pinpoint bottlenecks. Plus, you’ll be automatically notified when the system detects a problem. MainView for DBCTL enables you to maintain a sustainable balance between the volume of work your system must process and the capacity it has to do so. It also provides extensive real-time and historical performance data in a variety of useful views.

MainView Extensions for IMS™ TM include BMC Log Analyzer for IMS and BMC Energizer for IMS Connect. They feed additional information to MainView from IMS Connect and IMS log entries to provide a more complete view of your IMS environment, and speed mean time to resolution (MTTR) of IMS problems. Log Analyzer for IMS makes it easy to diagnose problems like transaction failures and delays, by correlating log record data into an application flow. It shows transactions in context with other activity occurring in the system, which aids both experienced and newer IT staff and provides audit reporting. Energizer for IMS Connect balances workloads, enables dynamic changes, eliminates the need to code assembly language exits, and prevents outages caused by runaway transactions overloading data stores.